An Easter Disciple eBook

AN OPENING WORD

Many voices had been speaking of eternal life, before
the days of the Son of man. Especially pronounced
had been the teachings of the Egyptians that there
is another world. In their Acadian hymns the
Chaldaeans had dimly foretold a future life.
The belief of the Parsees, as expressed in their Zend-Avesta,
had included a place of darkness for the evil soul
and a reward for the good in the realm of light.
The Hindus had declared, in their Rig-Veda, their
beautiful conception of the immortality of the soul,
and had written of a future “imperishable world,
where there is eternal light and glory.”
The Grecian and Roman mythologies had voiced their
hope of blessedness for the shades of the departed.
Everywhere serious men had been asking as to the experiences
beyond the grave. It was as if the Eastern world
had become a vast parliament chamber, wherein the
nations were proclaiming their different doctrines
as to a future life.

In the midst of these varying and uncertain voices,
Christ spoke his authoritative message. There
was no wavering in his tone. What the Oriental
philosophers were guessing, he revealed; what the
Hebrew prophets had foreshadowed in their holy writings,
he unfolded in full light. The ancient Vedic
hymns, the oracles of Greece, the Egyptian Book
of the Dead, anticipating by two thousand years
the Hebrew exodus—­all these are naught compared
with the words of that inspired Teacher who spoke in
Palestine.

In addition, Christ was himself the vital evidence
of the resurrection which he taught. Against
the assaults of doubt his unique teachings are buttressed
forevermore by his own return from the land of silence.
In a short week after his words to Martha at Bethany
he had become, through his own rare experience, the
resurrection and the life. Not the dead Buddha,
nor the departed Zoroaster, nor the vanished Pythagoras
ever came back through the opened door of the sepulcher,
wearing the grave clothes of those who sleep.
Human fancy had never dreamed of such a rapturous
denouement for faiths other than Christianity.
The resurrection of the Lord is the crowning narrative
with which the Gospels close. It is a risen Christ
who repairs the wastage of human decay and death.
A voice above all those from Ind or Persia or the
Nile speaks henceforth in Judaea and the world concerning
immortality. The superlative Easter argument
is the risen Christ himself.

I

A ROMAN QUEST

“If one might only have a guide to the truth.”—­Seneca.

On Scopus, the high mountain north of Jerusalem, the
Roman camp was pitched, that last autumn in the ministry
of Jesus of Nazareth. A few years further on,
if the warriors of the Emperor Tiberius could then
have foreseen the future, Titus was to quarter his
famous legions on that vantage point; and from its
elevation he was to hurl himself as a resistless battering
ram against the Holy City. But, on this autumn
day, when these chronicles begin, no blare of trumpets
was summoning the Roman soldiery to arms; only the
feet of the camp sentinels, as they walked their appointed
rounds, broke the quiet of the sunlit afternoon.